Washington Times:
A leaked report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog indicated Tuesday that Iran's nuclear program experienced a one-day shutdown last week, indicating a slowing of Tehran's nuclear progress, analysts said.
In a nine-page report, copies of which were obtained by several news outlets, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) noted that centrifuges at Iran's Natanz enrichment nuclear plant were not being fed uranium on Nov. 16.
The number of installed centrifuges, the report said, had fallen from 8,856 to 8,426 over the past three months, presumably because of technical difficulties, though Iran increased its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to about 7,000 pounds — enough, analysts say, to produce two nuclear bombs if refined further.
"The key point is that [the report] underscores Iran's continued failure to comply with its international nuclear obligations," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday.
The IAEA did not list a cause of the shutdown, but speculation centered on the Stuxnet computer worm that reportedly has bedeviled the Iranian nuclear program for months. Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi dismissed claims of Stuxnet's impact Tuesday, saying, "[Iran's] enemies failed to achieve their goal."
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We need to get the Stuxnet worm to North Korea and quickly. I would hope that it would have messed up more Iranian centrifuges though. It is possible that it did or was on the verge of doing so before they shut things down.
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